


combing attractions

by fueledbysquee



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Not Famous, M/M, borderline not!fic, hair stylists
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:17:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1242595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fueledbysquee/pseuds/fueledbysquee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick:<br/>What do I like about doing hair?  Um, well, it's a captive audience, innit?  </p><p>Harry:<br/>Well I've always had quite a lot of hair, myself, and my sister is, like, quite experimental.</p><p>Pieces of an AU so very loosely based on <i>Hair</i>, the BBC Three hair styling competition, not the musical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introductions

**Author's Note:**

> I googled "hair styling puns" for the title after deciding I really probably couldn't go with "scissor sisters" or "the incredibly true adventure of two quiffs in love" 
> 
> Sorry. This was too silly an idea for a proper title.

The building - Studio? Set? Nick didn't know what they were meant to be calling it, but surely one of the production staff would drop the name eventually. Anyway, the _building_ looked like the most effortlessly posh place he'd ever seen in real life, and Nick had to resist the urge to take a picture and send it off to everyone he knew. They'd all see it soon enough on the telly, Christ. 

Logically, yes, of course, they'd have to be in a real building with electricity and tables and chairs and mirrors and all, but he'd still half expected one of those whatsits they built for telly that weren't _real_. This was a proper building, brick walls and giant windows that would be a nightmare for heating costs if they were anything like the ones in his flat. 

He'd imagined an adulthood that was a bit less well-acquainted with heating costs, but there you go.

If Nick hadn't already been halfway to sicking up all over his shoes, this bright, busy space that looked more than a little like Monica's apartment on _Friends_ would have done the trick. It was swarming in proof that this show was important enough to _someone_ for them to throw money at the decorating on top of housing them for a month and everything else. 

Not to mention paying all the staff. There were what seemed like fifty people with headsets on, mostly walking places very quickly or squinting at papers and monitors in an intimidating manner, but at the far side of the room Nick could see a handful of people who looked nearly as uneasy as he felt, hands wrapped around paper cups of tea.

* * *

There were meant to be eight contestants, not nearly so many as on Bake Off, or Next Top Model or Big Brother, but that made a sort of sense for a new show, limited run, unless they were going to chuck off two or three people every week. 

Christ, he hoped he wasn't the first one sent off.

He still had a hard time believing that anyone other than his mum and closest friends were going to want to sit down and watch him fiddle with some girl's hair for an hour, and even his mum was a bit of a long bet. 

He caught the eye of one of the girls across the circle from him, friendly looking, big curly hair that made her look a bit unfortunately like a cocker spaniel, and she shrugged back at him with a bit of a watery smile.

It probably wasn't a good sign.

She's an Amy, he remembered that much, because he'd asked her to spell it and all when they'd gone around the circle introducing themselves. She'd looked so pleased when he said his best friend was called Aimee that he hadn't the heart to point out that she was nothing at all like his Aimee in any way that he could discern. She really did seem very nice, though, and like she'd give lovely hugs. He very much suspected he was going to need one of those hugs before long, so it'd be nice if she wasn't first kicked off either.

Other than Unfortunately Spanielish Amy, there was a Scott (ironic bald head but interesting facial hair), a Chloe (maybe a bit too clever for her own good, but statement eyeglasses that he admired), a Dev (a little sleepy-seeming, but great laugh) and a Sara (who'd rolled in just after Nick apologizing about a dog emergency and worrying whether her usually competent husband would find a way to burn the house down or poison everyone in her absence).

It was while Nick and Sara were sipping over-steeped tea and sharing poorly-trained-dog stories that trouble arrived. He was wearing skinny jeans and at least two and a half shirts and had a messenger bag slung across his shoulders, and given how he twirled and then almost toppled over to look at something behind Nick, Nick had no idea how he'd made it across the room with both the furnishings and all the parts of his body intact. "Harry," the cloud of hair on legs said, holding out his hand to shake Nick's. "I'm Harry." He said it with half a smile that produced a dimple in his cheek, and it took Nick a moment to remember that he was supposed to say his own name in return. Harry was still holding his hand. 

Sara made a noise like a smothered laugh and jostled his elbow, which was the reminder Nick needed that he was standing in the middle of a brightly lit room staring like a bleedin' idiot. "Nick," he said, and if his voice came out like he'd just spent a week stumbling across a desert, well. "Morning, y'alright?"

Harry's smile widened, producing a second dimple to match the first, and a frankly unwelcome additional flutter in Nick's stomach along with it. "Yeah, yes, good, you?" he said, but then he was blessedly turning to devastate someone else's shaky emotional state.

As he moved around the circle, Harry seemed equally delighted to see everyone else as he had been to meet Nick. He very nearly shook hands with his whole body, and he repeated everyone's name, and when his back was turned, Nick absolutely kept his gaze focused shoulders-and-up. He was just generally the most ridiculously sincere thing that Nick had ever seen outside of an animated film. Sara was watching Harry with a critical eye, and Nick made an inquiring noise. "What's that then?"

"Just checking for cartoon birds," she whispered back. "Maybe a helpful mouse in his pocket. Can't be too careful, in a competition like this."


	2. interviews

Once they'd all nervously downed enough tea to float away on it, one of the headsetted producers, Laura Something Something, called them to attention and handed them each a piece of A4 with the day's schedule printed on it. It looked like a lot, given that it'd already gone ten. 

"So, as you can see," she said, "we'll do a bit of interview, and then tour you around so you know where everything is, and then we're off!" A few more of the producery sort of busy people filed in behind Laura, and they pulled away Nick's fellow competitors in pairs, leading the groups in four different directions, "Just for a bit of visual variety in the backdrops," she said. "We're going to do this rather a lot, to break up the challenge footage."

He and Harry were led by their camera crew out the back of the building to a little pier overlooking the water. The chilly breeze ruffled the hair haloed around Harry's stupidly attractive face, and left Nick fairly certain that his own nose was going to go red and he'd have snot running everywhere by the time it was his turn. Brilliant. He couldn't even pull on a hat like Harry had, without ruining his quiff. And damned if he was going to give the nation, or the tiny fraction of the nation, a first impression of him with _flat hair_.

* * *

The questions weren't anything out of the ordinary, and Nick was pretty sure he'd already answered some of them when they'd come to film him at his flat the week before, but he'd never have known it from Harry's responses. He just seemed so bloody _pleased_ to be talking to their producer Becca, and he laughed a little and then paused to think like no one in his life had ever asked him why he liked styling people's hair, or what he had been doing with his life before this. Or what his name was. It was about that point that Nick realized Harry was putting on a show, and loving every second of it.

"Well I've always had quite a lot of hair, myself," Harry said, with a tug at one of his wayward curls, "and my sister is, like, quite experimental, so she used to get me to do her hair for things she wanted to try that were too complicated to do by herself, and then I'd end up doing her friends' hair. I ended up as part of the entertainment at a lot of girls' nights."

Becca laughed, and Harry seemed to realize what he'd said, and frantically waved his hands.

"Oh, god," he said. It was hard to tell, with the wind stinging everyone's face, but that might've been a blush rising on Harry's cheeks. "No, no, not like that."

"So you didn't have girls lined up waiting to get your hands on them?" she asked.

"No!" Harry protested, and then seemed to reconsider. "Well, sometimes," he said. His cheeks were really pink, in a way that Nick wasn't sure he'd ever seen on an actual person before. He tended to go all blotchy when he was embarrassed, like the feeling of humiliation alone wasn't enough. "Er, yeah," Harry said after a moment, after he coughed a bit and fussed with his hair some more. "I guess that was alright, too."

* * *

After sharing a nod with the cameraman, of the _this boy is our golden ticket_ variety, Becca steered Harry back into calmer biographical waters.

"I've just finished with school," Harry said, "and looking at uni, I wanted to read a bit of everything, and I was in a band for a bit, so I thought I could be a singer, and I quite like doing hair, so when this came up, I thought, well, why not? Instead of spending all that time in class for something only to figure out I was bound to be rubbish at it, I thought this would be a bit of fun, and I could see how I measure up on, like, natural talent, and get some people who really know what they're doing to tell me what they thought."

"You know how it is," Harry said. "My mum always thinks I'm brilliant - everyone's mum thinks they're brilliant. My sister's a bit of a tougher customer, but I know how to do what she likes now, so that's taken some of the challenge out of it."

It was sweet that Harry believed that, and Nick had no doubt that his family really was lovely, but he'd had enough experience of the _'couldn't you just'_ variety with his parents, with some of his friends' families, that he knew just how blinkered that was. It didn't make Nick want to like him any less, but it certainly did make him seem young. 

"Does my mum let me do her hair?" Harry was laughing as he answered, all out of proportion with the question, so probably at some charming family memory. "Well, no, no she doesn't, so maybe there's something to that."

* * *

Harry had reeled off a frighteningly long list of fashion magazines - none of which would make it into the show if the papers Nick had had to read about brand marks on clothing were any indication - when Becca hit on another winner. "Oh, and youtube," Harry said. "Videos online are ace, all those tutorials and beauty vloggers."

Becca perked up again at the mention of the vloggers. Good instincts, that one, if they could get Harry to blush and talk about pretty girls some more. Not that the family thing wasn't great - Nick'd take a good family story any day of the week, there was just something about the people you were tied to forever whether you liked it or not - but he would absolutely have tuned in to watch Harry and his sparkling eyes talk about the things he loved. And if the thing that gorgeous, charming Harry loved happened to also be a thing that teenaged girls loved, well, that had to be everything BBC Three had ever dreamed of, didn't it?

* * *

When it was Nick's turn, it occurred to him that he could have been using the time to plan what he was going to say instead of pretending not to watch every word drop from Harry's mouth. At least he could still feel his face well enough, and a cautious swipe of his face with his sleeve didn't turn up anything too awful.

Becca didn't look like she was all that invested in Nick's answers, but he'd win her over soon enough. Great at drawing people in, was Nick. "What do I like about doing hair?" He grinned, and Becca smiled back. "Well, it's a captive audience, innit? I used to go with my mum to her appointments, and everyone seemed so happy, and there was always good gossip. And then when I was a bit older, if I had an evening babysitting my niece - great kid, great hair, hi Liv! - I'd always do something with her hair. I know I cut it, once, when she was quite young and I was maybe fourteen? Didn't try that again. Hated it, did her mum. But she'd let me braid it or pin it up, put all sorts of silly ribbons in it, whatever we had to hand.

"And then in uni I had friends who were fairly experimental, so sometimes, I think they were a bit disappointed if their hair turned out like I had planned it to. Like if it was a bit uneven, or curled the wrong way, it was almost better. Proper odd, those girls, but _such_ fun.

"My best friends now, Aimee and Collette, they're both great sports, too. The first time I dyed Aimee's hair, I thought it was a right mess, but she's quite loud - she's American, but I think she's even a bit out there for an American, and she said she thought it was the best thing she'd ever seen.

"What's that thing you call it, when you fall in love with your captor? Something something."

Becca frowned, either confused or thinking or worried where he was headed, maybe all three. Nick tried to scan back through the last few things he'd said, wondering how far off the rails he'd gone. "Stockholm syndrome?"

Nick clapped his hands together. "Yes! That. I wonder if I might have done that to Aimee, only, like, with bad hair. I did get quite good at the coloring, eventually. Collette doesn't let me cut her hair either, but she'll let me style it, if she's got something big planned or a date or summat. Great sport, she is."

Nick could probably keep talking about his friends and their hair disasters for hours. Had done, at some point, he was sure, but it probably wasn't as compelling without the pictures to go along. Eventually Becca broke in. "But you never went to school for it? Even though you loved the salon from when you were little?"

"Wanted to be all sorts of things, when I was a kid. Kids do, don't they?" It didn't seem like much of a dream, being a professional hair stylist. Not like he was going to go all misty-eyed about it. That had been the easiest of the things he'd been talked out of wanting when he grew up. Sensible, that was the important thing.


	3. roommates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> because continuity is for suckers, but let's assume at this point that they're at least past the first challenge, and one of the two competitors who I didn't bother to name has been sent home.

They ended up in bed - well, more _on_ bed, than proper in it, but anyway. They ended up sat next to each other on Nick's bed, both well on top of the duvet because it was boiling hot upstairs. And it was all because Nick had put his headphones on and turned up the music while Harry was in the shower. Harry'd left the door to the en suite cracked open, as they'd discovered early on that it took ages for the mirror to clear enough to be useful after a hot shower of any length, and Nick was discovering previously untested depths of self-restraint.

The music was more self-defense than anything else. He was hoping that the moderate volume of noise in his ears would a) keep him from listening in on Harry's shower like an absolute creep and b) distract him enough keep him from imagining anything about Harry's shower in the absence of being able to hear him. It worked well enough that Nick even managed to close his eyes without any half-naked images of Harry appearing behind his eyelids, and he missed the shower turning off.

Harry said something that Nick couldn't make out over the probable damage he was doing to his hearing, and when Nick opened his eyes, Harry mimed pulling a headphone away from his ear. "What are you listening to?" he asked.

Harry had come back into the room in just his pants, having dried off with only partial success, and with a towel draped half on his shoulder as he scrubbed at his wet hair. It took Nick a moment to remember what album he'd queued up, and he'd reflexively turned his mp3 player towards Harry as if it were the cover of a book, even though there was no way he'd be able to read it across the room. He had to turn it back to read _Purple Rain_ off the screen.

Harry paused in his drying-off, head cocked like Puppy at her most perplexed. "Oh," he said. "Is it good?"

"Is it... Christ, I'm the oldest person in the world, aren't I?" Nick was so outraged on Prince's behalf that he fully forgot that he'd been trying to avoid most things Harry-related. He was up across the room, grabbing Harry by the wrist and dragging him over to the bed before Harry had time to do more than raise his eyebrows.

"You're an _infant_ ," Nick said. "And I will have a chat with your mum later about not listening to enough Prince with her children."

"'m not," Harry shot back, which was a fair point, given the number of tattoos he had, but not one Nick was currently willing to concede. "It's just that there's a lot of music, isn't there? I need some time to catch up."

"Well, we're starting that right now," he said, pulling his headphones down over Harry's ears. "Never heard _Purple Rain_ , honestly."

It took about thirty seconds after he'd settled Harry and pressed play on "Let's Go Crazy" for Nick to realize how horrifically awkward it was to be sat in silence next to a half-naked man.

Harry, for his part, seemed wholly unperturbed by his closeness to Nick, placidly pleased at a very cow-like level, or what Nick imagined cows were like, anyway. They couldn't possibly have much to get excited about. 

Well, up until the slaughter, anyway.

Cows probably didn't listen to music.

It was probably just as well Nick wasn't trying to hold up his end of a conversation just then.

And he was definitely going veggie again once they were out of this thing and he could shop for his own food.

* * *

And so, despite Nick's very best Harry-avoiding efforts, then Harry was sat on the bed next to him in his pants and a bit of towel over one shoulder, very pink and well scrubbed with damp curls hanging around his face. And Nick _could_ have gotten up, but there wasn't really anywhere to sit besides Harry's bed, unless he wanted to leave the room, which he most definitely did not. He was rubbish at keeping to an agenda, anyway.

"Oh!" Nick felt himself jostled as Harry poked him far harder than necessary. "I know this one."

"Yes, well done, you should know _all of them_." Nick grumbled back. "Just keep listening."

Even though it was what he was forcing Harry to do, Nick never _just_ listened to music. He was always listening, yes, whether it was radio or something else, but it was while he was doing things, cleaning or working or going for a run. Mostly the first two, if he was honest, but he made an effort at least at the third.

As much as Nick might have wanted to narrate Harry's listening experience, unless he wanted to swap his good headphones for the shitty earbuds he had for working out, he'd only be guessing at what Harry was listening to.

It got slightly less impossible to sit there when Harry shut his eyes, gently bobbing his head to the beat that Nick could just barely hear, but then, just when Nick thought he might not spontaneously combust, Harry lay back across the bed. Nick suppressed a groan, and began to wonder if he was being punished for something in particular, rather than his typical karmic payback for general flightiness at all times and sloth at the weekend.

Nick grabbed the copy of _Heat_ that he'd stolen from the lounge and toppled over onto his side, keeping his back firmly turned on Harry and his everything. He pulled his pillow closer, and settled in to learn what he could about... whoever that blonde woman at the lower right corner was. Maybe she had worn or done something ridiculous that he could use for inspiration on their next challenge.

**Author's Note:**

> I can also be found [on tumblr](http://fueledbysquee.tumblr.com/), if that's your thing.


End file.
